Paper chains feature in some recent work by Art & Language. For what kinds of festivity might they provide appropriate décor, or what kinds of reawakening do they imply? Possible answers are considered with regard to two further questions: what kinds of precedent do these works evoke; and, given the expansion of the field of art in the age of the art fair, what modes of discrimination might they expect of their spectators?

Sometime towards the beginning of last year a long paper-chain appeared in the studio of Art & Language. It hung in regular swags from a line strung across one end of the working space. Seeing it for the first time I was momentarily transported back to my childhood, and to the business of preparation for Christmas. I recalled the flat packets of coloured strips, the long process of pasting them into links, and the transformation of the house as the chains were pinned up. It would require more than a single chain, however, to imbue the Art & Language studio with festive spirit. In this case, it was clear from a closer look that the strips of paper contained printed words and phrases, variously legible according to their position on the links, the orientation of the viewer, and the degree of contrast between printed words and coloured ground. This was a custom-made paper-chain &masr; an entertaining late solution perhaps, to the dilemma by which early Conceptual Art was dogged in its mission to overcome framed autonomy: what was one to do with the pieces of paper with writing on them? Did one fix them to the wall as though to be looked at, or put them in a book as though to be read? Someone with an improbably high familiarity with our written output might eventually work out that, were the various links to be unglued and stretched out in line, they would compose a single continuous text, specifically, the lyrics for a song recently recorded by the Red Krayola. That this text was in fact rendered almost impossible to read without considerable exertion on the part of a highly mobile spectator would establish nothing that was not already quite evident about Art & Language's propensity for concealment of detail and for the discomfiture of its would-be consumers.

In the current state of the art-world, it's quite imaginable that the hanging paper-chain might be designated "a work"; and displayed in a gallery or sold at an art fair, with scant regard for its evident vulnerability and for the problems of keeping it clean. But not, I think, as a work by Art & Language. As the business of alienation is comprehended within the practice, nothing leaves the studio unless it is at least in principle equipped for survival in the form of its manufacture. This limiting protocol - or preference - was more or less self-consciously accepted by Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden at the point late in the 1970s when it became clear that certain of Art & Language's operations had come naturally to require a studio-like place of production. The modern museums of the world may now be prepared to acquire all kinds of objects that are most unlikely to remain intact without the continuing ingenuity and occasional intervention of conservators. It nevertheless remains the habit of Art & Language to usher as art-work only such things as can be made well - and made well as it were in-house, since it is a further disposition of Art & Language to set limits on the conscription of technology in pursuit of Wagnerian enterprises. This has been described as the age of post-medium art. But the concept of the well-made implies a medium of some kind against which a non-trivial sense of competence can be tested - however unprecedented the relations may be between what is to count as a medium and the technical circumstances under which that medium will establish conditions of specificity.

Try-out
Given Art & Language's limiting principles then, it was evident that the paper-chain must be some kind of preliminary try-out. Even so, it was an odd enough thing to find in the studio, with its bathetic connotations of festivity. In fact I should not have been surprised by it. It's clear enough with hindsight that the idea had been brewing for some ten years. 1998 is the date of Art & Language's essay "Making Meaningless." This was a kind of extended deliberation on the critical requirement that, on pain of turgidity, whatever in practice is inflated - in scale, in genre, in professional ambition, in technical adventure - must at some point be brought low. Among the items that fed this deliberation were memories of Conceptual Art's irresponsible occupation of the space of painting, questions about the status of printed texts in the collaged newspapers of Picasso's and Braque's Cubism, and an interest in the dialectical potential of decoration to operate subversively. This is from the end of that essay.

"If I hang up the newspaper as a paper-chain, the text of the newspaper may well remain intact... but the newspaper has lost its first-order significance as a newspaper. (That's one of the most obvious diagrams.) But can we correct this diagram to the emergency conditional - to the "just in case" - and say the paper-chain is (or could be) decorative just in case the newspaper is read as a newspaper, or etc...The paper-chain may also of course be made of something else; a "Painting" or a Conceptual Art text. How would an emergency-type conditional work in this...case?"

So I should have been prepared. There is a tendency in the history of Art & Language for exotic hypothetical questions and conjectures to be addressed sooner or later by means of practical work. And "work" is here the operative term - both as noun and as verb. To ask "how would it work?" in such a context is to ask whether there can be a work with the properties specified, that can be well made, can be regarded as art, and can be deserving of consideration as such. Hence, then, the practical conceit of a paper-chain made of something that is both a kind of painting and a Conceptual Art text - or a Conceptual Art-ish text that is somehow incorporated into a painting, as many of Art & Language's texts have been over the course of some twenty-five years.

What followed in this case was a series of exploratory moves to establish an appropriate technical vehicle - a paper-like fabric that could be painted and printed with text and that would preserve its relative rigidity and its adhesion when the links were put under permanent light strain. Once that was sorted out, there remained the matter of designing appropriate types of protective environment. A number of small wall-mounted works were made in two different formats. In the first, short and variously coloured lengths of chain are set horizontally inside narrow white glass-fronted boxes. Each chain is stretched tight by the adjustment of a screw concealed at one end of the box. In works in the second format, the lengths of chain are tensioned like inverted arches by small wedges concealed between the separate links, so that each appears to hang as a single swag within a deeper box.

MementoAmong the factors that go to make up one's response to these objects are the inevitable connotations of festivity, variously prompted according to the colour-scheme employed, the quite different suggestions of frustrated sense and possible nonsense aroused by the visible fragments of text, the connection to what survives of a tradition of painting in the wake of abstract art's exhaustion, and references respectively to the coloured reliefs of Don Judd and the hanging felt pieces of Robert Morris - references that sit strangely both with the connotations of festivity and with the presence of the fragments of text.

There remains some room for doubt about just what is "the work" in any given case. Should the white box be seen simply as a protective container or "vitrine", and the fragment of decorated chain be conceived as the primary object - a kind of ambiguous but plangent memento, in the manner of one of Joseph Beuys's pigges bones? The sensible answer to that question, of course, is No. It is in the superficially paradoxical relationship between box and chain that the critical content of these works largely resides. Apart from serving to invoke a tradition of things seen as paintings, this is the means by which they attach themselves parasitically to the art-world's surface culture of celebration and waste. It is the necessary and clinical character of the framing box that establishes the chain as a sample to be preserved intact; forensic evidence, as it were, in some case that has yet to be mounted and tried. (For all the efforts of post-modernist indefatigables like Daniel Buren, it is still widely believed that the satisfaction of conditions of display and distribution is secondary to an idealised "creative process"; that it must follow upon a claim for aesthetic integrity that is made on behalf of the avant-garde object or concept. It is the position of Art & Language, on the other hand, that the satisfaction of these conditions is crucial to such integrity as any work might be thought to possess. If your art is a bisected cow in formaldehyde, you don't adequately disarm criticism when the tank leaks by claiming that the job of sealing the tank was not part of the "artistic" work.)

A number of Art & Language's boxed paper-chains were exhibited and sold at Distritto Cu4tro in Madrid in 2007 while several others have been dispersed through Mulier Mulier in Belgium. It is of course quite possible that the success these items have enjoyed in the market is more readily explained by their pristine appearance and by their simple connotations of festivity than by any of the more troubling associations that those connotations permit their purchasers to ignore.

Charles HARRISON

Part of a paper read at the conference "Our Literal Speed", ZKM, Karlsruhe, 2 March 2008.